Saturday, February 16, 2013

University of Nebraska yearbooks online - transcription help needed

photo credit: unl.edu

Today's mail brought the latest issue of GoodNuz, one of the publications from the University of Nebraska Alumni Association. Among the GreatNuz in this issue is that digital versions of University yearbooks are online. These yearbooks date back to 1884 and go through 2001. Regular production of the yearbook ceased in 1972, the year of my graduation. Yes, I located my mug shot in that yearbook!

These books are a great resource for locating your Nebraska ancestors who attended the University of Nebraska. They are also full of Nebraska history and famous Nebraskans (and U of N students such as Willa Cather and Johnny Carson). I'm looking forward to browsing through these online books, but there's something even better in store and you can help!

Transcribers Welcome!

Anyone is welcome to transcribe pages from these yearbooks. You can get started by visiting http://transcribe.unl.edu/. You can create an account if you want to track your transcription progress. Or you can transcribe pages without an account. If you got addicted to transcribing the 1940 census, here's another project that will keep you up late at night!

Having the transcriptions of these yearbooks available will be a tremendous resource for genealogists looking for their ancestors who attended the University of Nebraska. You can transcribe a page at a time; you can even save it and mark it as unfinished if you can't complete the transcription in one session.

I hope my fellow Nebraska researchers and those with Nebraska ties will see the value in this resource and jump on the bandwagon to help transcribe these yearbooks. So far, just 271 of 34,816 pages have been transcribed. The transcription page displays the top transcribers, so perhaps we can get a little friendly competition going!

Let's see how quickly we genealogists can help to see this project through to completion!